Elvissey Read Online Free

word, and with the word, and the world was the word.
    "Watch!!" John shouted. Our driver swerved slidelong, rushing through the reds; at 156th escaped blindsiding by
another Bronxbound limo. John clasped the man's shoulders, steering him curbways as he slowed to a stop. "You're
risking," he told the driver, a reassigned Security staffer; as
he told him that I knew that it was my safety, not their own,
that so concerned my husband.

    "Known," the man mumbled, barely audible.
    "I'll cruise us,"John said. "Shift." Stepping out, wheeling
himself, John eased our driver into shotgun position; spoke
to the dash so kindly as to his co-worker, and when the car
responded we moved on: righting, lefting, rivercrossing,
passing from the gone world into the one which would be.
    Under Dryco guidance, at inestimable cost, our city rebuilded atop the Bronx hills, designed half trad, half in the
style Eurotrenders termed Dreizinuovy. New New York's
nightlight made lurid its host of shades, pastel and primary:
apricot and aubergine, lemon and lilac, cerise and cerulean
and deep emerald green. Betowered and lowdomed, the city
showed so spired as a bed of nails; tubes bridged streetcanyons eighty floors over, sodastraw elevators ran along
building-sides toward rich azimuths bedecked with fauxcurlicue and neo-arabesque. Clouds of tiny copters circled
midge-like round those grown and growing hothouse flowers, our garden town. The Met, at intervals, displayed fading
comic panels, whereupon more conservative appreciators of
art would see inked, half a century past by those in the know,
our city's image: sealed within a bottle, one candid among
many miniatures lifted from a farrago of worlds.
    Old New York would in time be sea-swallowed, as Chicago
would go Nineveh as each daily dust-storm laid down another coat, as LA would in time smother beneath its Jovian
atmosphere's weight; Moscow might crumble, Lagos and
Karachi burn anew with nuclear fire, Cairo and Bangkok
and Brazzaville depopulate at one hundred souls per hour.
Yet as in Tokyo, as in Berlin and London, new New York
would-upon completion-show as all in our world should have shown, had so many not slowed along the roadway to
view the accidents previous onlookers caused.

    New New York would hold a million. Its presentiment
screamed the unstated, that its inhabitants had been retrofitted as well, to assure perfection. In outlanders' minds-in
the Bowl and among the Coasters and down in the vast
Southern delta-New Yorkers underwent a most complete
regooding: they were reimagined as reflections, new Atlan-
teans plucked landward from water; their wet hair so blond
as mine was becoming, their moist eyes so blue as my contacts feigned. We who lived here knew true; our hills' city
provided only new jars for old specimens, who, when
pricked, yet gushed red and not gold-vermilion.
    John and I had a fiftieth floor place in a Concourse tower;
twenty other families lived in our building. We sidewalked
ourselves, watching empty trolleys race down the boulevard's gardened aisles, their ads' neon belettering the dark,
the bulbed glow of Dryco's face tracklighting fore and aft,
the sign of its word; everybody heard about the word. Our
driver, deafened, sped into his night, two red lights on behind.
    "How long?" I asked, watching his meteors skid out of
sight.
    "Week," John said. "He's edged. Let's up ourselves, Iz."
    The seven million of old New York could have roomed
here in comfort, high atop the hills. Mooted: in new New
York, those not regooded weren't there anymore.
    We lay in our single bed's separate worlds. John's wide white
back lifted high on my left, its crags appearing as an iceberg
around which I could never maneuver in time. He shivered;
mayhap his own coldness chilled too bonedeep. Stroking
him, pulling our comforter around us, I warmed him as I
could.

    "Sleepaway," he murmured. "Deepdead shagged, Iz.
Dreamtime calls. Listen."
    "Talk to me,